PAPERBOY

for 1 player
by Atari Corp.
$39.95

OVERVIEW:
  In Norman Rockwell's America, purehearted young men got their start in
the financial world by delivering newspapers or selling fruit. In PAPERBOY
for the Atari Lynx (an adaptation of the Atari Games/Tengen arcade title),
you play such a young man, out to deliver a week's worth of papers on either
Easy Street, Middle Road, or Hard Way.

  You start off with a bike, ten papers, and two blocks of customers. As
you ride up the street, your objective is to deliver papers to your customers
with a well-placed toss. Aim carefully -- breaking windows is a fast way to
lose a customer. Between customers, throw papers haphazardly to destroy
other people's property(!) or hit people(!!) for bonus points(!!!). At the
end of the run, you can run an obstacle course and show off your bike-riding
and paper-throwing prowlness.

  It's not all peaches and cream, though. Crashing your bike into an
obstacle (incoming traffic, pedestrians, animals, etc.) will lose you a
paperboy. Lose all your customers, or all your boys, and the game ends.
Survive an entire week and you may actually keep your job.

GAMEPLAY:
  A decent adaptation of the arcade game. Minute game details from the
arcade original are preserved intact, such as the "hidden targets" (the
catburglar, the birdbath --> periscope, etc.). Scoring and gameplay are
identical enough that veterans of the original will feel right at home.

  There are a few nitpicky points that detract, though. For one thing,
while you can slow down/speed up the bike, you cannot STOP. For another,
the Lynx version seems a little bit easier than the original. Making
mailbox "bullseyes", dodging obstacles, and generally staying alive are
easier to do. You do get to pick three different streets of varying
difficulty, though there's no way to refine the game further.

  One minor "cute touch" -- the Lynx version maintains a seperate high
score table for each street. Get a score in the top five for the street,
and you get to enter your name. No score-saving mechanism, however.

GRAPHICS/SOUND:
  A mixed bag. Graphics are clearly distinguishable (breakdancers from
drunks, trash cans from tombstones), but left me with a sense of "could
have been done better". Every extra graphic nicety was counterbalanced by
a weak point, leaving an overall OK graphics impression.

  Similary, the sounds are indifferential. The background music is a pale
shadow of the original, but the other game sounds are appropriate and
helpful (especially the musical riffs when you deliver a paper). The volume
of the sounds vary widely, though -- you strain to hear a delivery riff
and have your concentration broken by a (relatively) loud "car horn", for
instance -- again leaving an overall balanced impression.

SUMMARY:
  Not a bad game, though not one of the Lynx's best. It's not a fast-paced
breakneck-speed game, so people looking for relaxation should be interested.
If you can overlook average-quality graphics and sound, and did not
dominate the arcade version, this is worth trying out.

        GAMEPLAY:       7.5
        GRAPHICS:       6
        SOUND:          6
        OVERALL:        7